This simply works! Thank you so much for sharing this info. I’m sure MS won’t be pleased. But in our case, we are non-profit with limited budget and technical know how. While we can still purchase the licenses for SCCM with discount, having to set up the entire SCCM just to deploy AV is a bit overkill in our environment. Now I can cross this requirement off my list and move on to other great projects!

According to your method, I have install the MSE in my Win Server 2012 and work nice, Thanx very much. but not there is an version update for MSE, And it needs to unstall it before install the new one, pls kindly tech me how to unstall the MSE. Many thanx!

I figured it out. Downloaded 474282_ENU_x64_zip from the link i posted above. Extracted with 7zip until I ended up with FEPInstall which was Client Version 4.5.216.0.

Set for Win 7 Compatibility then ran the FEPINSTALL /disableoslimit and it installed. It had me removed System Center Endpoint Protection but I now have the latest antimalware client version and it updated fine.

Now my server is not spamming me telling me I am missing important updates.

To Microsoft I’d like to say that you should be ashamed. We paid enough for the licensing for the server software, in my case over twice the cost of the hardware itself for the server. Why remove functionality from the product and pretend in the documentation that the product is bundled with Windows 8? You guys try to kill the competition (like Symantec) by giving something away for free for years… only to then remove it later and try to charge for it? Not cool, guys.

I didn’t try this with MSE, but I cannot see why scepinstall needs to be run in win7 compat mode. Using the /disableoslimit switch is sufficient to install on WSE2012. My rule is to never run in compat mode unless there is absolutely no other solution, and on my server compat mode is not even a consideration. That said, I think this hack is awesome for a home-spun solution. If you do this in a commercial environment you should still pay your dues.

Much appreciation for working this out. I have been successful getting the Systems Center Endpoint Protection to run on Essentials R2 with this method. The box is a simple homeserver replacement for an old HP homeserver that needed to be decommissioned.

You may or may not know that there is a trigger to install a SCEP Client on a Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2 – but what about updates? If you try to install the Update from October (Version 4.6.0305.0) the update will fail – for obvious reasons. On top of that the Update 2998627 which includes the Updatepackage is not available on the Microsoft WIndows Update Catalog Website. So what now? I’ll go on just as this article started: As you may or may not know there is a Cache-Folder for WIndows Updates located at C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download. This Folder holds a bunch of cryptic Hash-Values – take a not of the filesizes here. The Update shows up as 8,4 MB – lets check if there is a file which has roughly the same size. Bingo! So just to don’t disturb any Windows Update Services copy this file to a convenient place (like C:\) and rename it to scepinstall.exe (or whatever you prefer). Get an administrative CMD running and do scepinstall.exe /disableoslimit